Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (15 page)

“I think we better leave,” Ian said quietly. “It won’t be long before the police take down license-plate numbers for the cars around the park. And if they stop people and search their possessions…” Ian patted the bag over his shoulder. It still held grenades, and no telling what all was in the priest’s bag.

“Café across the street,” Pedro said, and they slowly made their way along the periphery of the crowd, behind the benches the priest used for support, and gradually made it to the curb.

Traffic on the one-way street had come to a complete standstill. Some drivers had gotten out of their cars to see what was going on, others were honking, and others had abandoned their cars and were moving into the park. Ian and Pedro threaded their way between the cars and took one of the many vacant tables on the deck. From the looks of it, people had abandoned their dinner and drinks and fled inside the building. Dozens of customers stood at the front windows inside the dining room, watching the chaos in the park.

Badly shaken, Ian quickly texted Wayra, but fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t replied, no one had taken their order, traffic hadn’t moved, and more and more cops on foot and on horseback poured into the park, along the sidewalks, headed toward the Pincoya. He worried about their bags being searched. “Isn’t there a church nearby?”

“South a few blocks.”

“Let’s head there. You rested enough to move on?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

They rose simultaneously from their chairs, left the deck, and walked briskly toward the corner. Traffic on the side street was also stalled, horns blared, drivers shouted, cops on horseback moved among cars and people, trying to maintain some semblance of order. But at least the shadows here were thicker, darker, and no one stopped them, questioned them, or demanded to see what was inside their packs.

Seven

Wayra

The explosion in the kitchen took out half the staircase wall and hurled Wayra back. He slammed into the opposite wall and lost consciousness. When he came to, flames leaped everywhere, rolling clouds of smoke surrounded him, he couldn’t see anything, could barely breathe. He grabbed on to the staircase railing, pulled himself upright, and raced up two flights of stairs, his arm pressed over his nose and mouth.

He ran into the first room on the third floor. Through the window, he saw thousands of bright, pulsating orbs darting toward the hotel. A dense bank of
brujo
fog spread out across the front of the property, close enough so that he could hear the
brujo
litany:
Find the body, fuel the body
 … Wayra tore out of the room and up the hall, his pack slamming against his hip, and dashed into a room at the end of the corridor.

He turned on the flashlight and hurried over to a window that looked out over the adjacent field. The metal pegs in the window jamb prevented him from opening it. Wayra slammed his bag against the glass, shattering it, then climbed out onto a narrow ledge and ticked through his rapidly shrinking options.

He could take a few
brujos
into himself and survive. But any more than that would cause him to choke and probably die before his shifter immune system could kick in. He could slip back in time, but that option held no guarantees, never had, never would, and too much could go wrong. So he tightened the strap of his pack, securing it on his shoulder, and slipped over the lip of the ledge to a wider protrusion several feet below.

The
brujo
litany had grown much louder, they were dangerously close. He shone his flashlight below, back and forth, up and out, exploring. Panic tightened like massive hands around his throat. The drop, he guessed, was about forty feet. He would prefer to make this jump in his shifter form, where he had more agility, greater accuracy, but there wasn’t enough room on the ledge for him to shift. In his human form, he would survive the jump, but might break a few bones.

Then the beam of the flashlight struck a pile of garbage, some of it in plastic bags, some of it just loose. A tall pile.

Find the body, fuel the body …

Wayra clasped his fingers around the strap of his bag, sidled to the far right of the ledge, and leaped.

He landed hard on his feet in the pile of garbage, fell forward onto his hands and knees, and sank into the stink. The fetid odor rushed into his nose, an acrid something in the air burned his eyes. But nothing snapped, nothing broke. He hauled himself up, climbed out of the pile, and raced for cover in the adjacent field of tall weeds. As he ran, he pressed the remote-control device for the explosives he had set in the stairwell—and dived for cover.

He struck the ground hard, rolled, curled into a fetal position, arms covering his head. In the instant the explosives blew, he heard the screams of annihilated
brujos,
their torturous shrieks for forgiveness, salvation, redemption, resurrection. Then there was just a weird, blissful silence. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of hungry ghosts had just been freed to move on through the afterlife.

Wayra felt their collective essence drifting in the air around him like bits of dust in sunlight. Some were confused, others were pissed off, and some understood precisely what had happened and moved quickly forward in the afterlife. He supposed there were helpers every step of the way, but who were they? Chasers? Something else?

It was at this point that the big questions usually broke down for him. Despite the centuries he had lived, some questions remained unanswerable. Who or what was above the chasers? Was there an ultimate Source?

He leaped up and ran through a deserted playground. Already, he could see mounted cops and police vehicles headed toward the Pincoya. He circled back toward the park, but there were too many police around here to risk getting to his car. Wayra kept walking away from the park, the cops, the sirens, exposure. He called Illary.

She didn’t answer.

He called Ian.

No answer.

He turned his cell phone off.

When he looked up, Ricardo stood there in a virtual form as an innocuous tourist in a floral shirt and jeans, with slicked-back gray hair, and a sleazy smile. Flanking him on either side were half a dozen members of his tribe.

“You want the death toll, Wayra?”

“Not really.”

“More than thirteen fucking thousand and still counting. Gone, Wayra. All of them.”

“That’s barely a fraction of what your tribe and Dominica’s seized over the centuries. Now they’re free to move on and make their own choices.”

“That’s such propaganda crap,” snapped a woman on Ricardo’s left.

Her virtual form struck Wayra as creative—but odd. Her wild blond hair, long and curly, fell halfway down her back. Elaborate tattoos of a naked woman on horseback traveled the length of her bare arms from wrist to shoulder. Her stunning face was so perfect and gorgeous that Wayra guessed she had been unattractive in her last physical life.

“And you are…?”

“Oh, Wayra, Wayra, how truncated your memory is,” she said softly.

And she assumed the form she’d had in her last physical life, that of the homely woman he had rescued from a pyre of burning bodies during the plague years in Europe. She and her son had been barely alive and he had turned them in order to save them.

Naomi.

After he had turned them, he, Naomi, and her son had spent a decade together, wandering across Europe. Her son was never right in the head, and when he’d killed himself, not an easy feat for a shifter, Naomi had blamed Wayra. They had split up, and in the centuries since, he’d assumed she had perished. That much, at any rate, was correct. She had died—and subsequently joined the
brujos.

“You joined
Ricardo
?” Wayra burst out laughing. “Oh, c’mon, you could’ve done better than this asshole, Naomi.”

“Watch your mouth, shifter,” Ricardo said, sliding his arm possessively around Naomi’s shoulders. “Naomi and I have done well together.”

“I have no history with him, no karma, nothing to work out,” she said. “I want you to know that my son went mad after you turned us, Wayra. He was never the same. He hated being a shape shifter. And so did I.”

“I saved your lives.”

“You should have let us die in that fire.”

“That’s not what you said then.”

“For Chrissake, Wayra,” Ricardo burst out. “That was centuries ago.”

“I was delirious,” Naomi said angrily. “And you know what? I’ve enjoyed being a
bruja
and traveling with Ricardo and his tribe more than I ever liked traveling with you.” Her right arm snapped upward, light shot from her fingertips, and pierced his chest.

An electrical shock drove him to his knees, something so horrifying and powerful that he couldn’t defend himself. And when it stopped, he was doubled over, gasping for breath, his forehead pressed to the pavement.

“I’ve learned a few tricks over the centuries,” she said with a laugh.

“Here’s the deal,” Ricardo said. “In retaliation for your taking out more than thirteen thousand of my tribe, we’re going to seize an equal number from Esperanza.”

“What fun that will be,” Naomi said, clapping her hands like a child who has just been told she can have an ice-cream cone.

“And we’re going to start with—”

Wayra shifted before she finished her sentence and took off through the field. The light that had pierced his chest seemed to have empowered him, certainly not Naomi’s intent. His chest ached, but it was as if the light had triggered the release of adrenaline or hormones and he could run faster than he ever had.

He tore across the field, raced up and down narrow, cobbled roads, deeper into old town. Sirens kept wailing, traffic poured into the side streets as drivers searched for alternate routes to wherever they were headed. Wayra finally stopped outside the Posada de Esperanza, the inn where Tess and Ian had first stayed as transitional souls.

The single-story building, made of bleached stones and wood, curved like a welcoming smile across the grounds. On either side of the doors to the lobby were brightly lit bay windows, shining like eyes. Dozens of people milled around on the sidewalk out front, speculating about the explosions, their voices laced with alarm.

Still in his dog form, Wayra weaved his way through a forest of legs and trotted into the crowded lobby. Inn employees hustled around, tending to guests, steering them toward the dining room, the café, the gym, the rooms or cottages out back. Many of the employees had lived through the dark years of the
brujo
assaults and associated the distant squeal of sirens and the explosions with the chaos and terror of those years. The smell of their collective fear nearly overwhelmed Wayra.

He slipped around the front desk, seeking a particular scent, that of Juanito Cardenas. When he found it, he made his way toward the back deck. One of the newer employees saw him, didn’t have any idea who or what he was—other than an annoying dog—and slapped his hands at Wayra. “
Afuera, perro.”
Outside, dog.

Wayra tucked his tail between his legs and bounded off the deck, nose to the sidewalk that twisted through this vast courtyard and its thirteen cottages. He followed the scent to the door of cottage 13, the same one where Tess and Ian had stayed more than four years ago. The synchronicity disturbed him. Even more troubling was that metal shutters covered the windows, the same kind of shutters that were on nearly every building in Esperanza. For years, those shutters had kept out the fog in which
brujos
traveled.

He didn’t want to shift out here, too many people were out and about, so he darted around to the back and moved into the thick brush. When he was human again, he stepped out of the bushes, brushed off his clothes, and rubbed at the center of his chest, where Naomi’s light had struck him. The area still ached, but he otherwise felt invigorated, and wondered what it was, how she had learned to manipulate energy in this way.

As he started back toward the front door, a hawk’s cry stopped him, and a moment later, Illary landed in front of him and shifted. She wore black jeans, boots, a black sweater that set off the copper hue of her hair, and she was pissed. The smell of her anger rolled off her in waves. “Why did you exclude me, Wayra?”

“You weren’t home.”

“I was at the hospital with Diego. You could’ve waited. My stake in Esperanza is as big as yours.”

Well, yes, it was.
Wayra slipped his arms around her, slid his fingers through her thick, luxurious hair.
“Lo siento, mí amor.”
He pulled back, lifted her chin, kissed her. Her mouth tasted cool and sweet, and as her body pressed against his, he sensed that she forgave him. “I spent so many centuries alone, Illary, that even now it takes getting used to.”

“Worst excuse I’ve ever heard,” she murmured, but her mouth brushed the tip of his nose and she stepped back, eyeing him from head to toe. “Something … is different.” She touched the center of his chest. “There. I feel … heat? Light? Pain? Definitely pain. I don’t understand, Wayra.”

“Me, either.” As he told her what had happened, her fingers swiftly unzipped his jacket, and she pulled up his shirt, examining the place where the light had pierced his chest.

“No visible scar or wound or anything.”

She kept rubbing her hands slowly over his chest, then across his belly, and down inside his jeans. Her mouth nuzzled his ear, her breath warmed the side of his face, she unzipped his jeans. His hands slipped under her sweater, across her breasts, down her spine, and over the delicious flare of her hips. Her skin felt like silk against his hands, his mouth.

He was now so aroused that he picked her up and carried her to the posada’s small, deserted greenhouse. He set her down against the soft earth, a cushion of darkness surrounding them. Their hunger for each other was so great that they made love there. Never mind that the location couldn’t be more inappropriate, that at any moment someone might enter the greenhouse and find them. It didn’t matter. This was about sex as an affirmation of life, a celebration that they were stronger together than they had ever been when they were alone.